by K H Lemoyne
Given the circumstances, he would never hear the resolution. That was the line Mia wouldn’t cross.
True to form, Mason unearthed a battery of details, which arrived via overnight mail delivery on a thumb drive followed by a phone message.
“Have sent you the initial police report. It’s public. Will send some autopsy pics as soon as I can get them. Those aren’t. Sort of touchy. Case is still open. Hope this helps your contact with resolution on his cousin’s disappearance, though a harsh ending. Tucson police and DEA are eager for anything to close this case. It’s a crime against one of their own. FYI, the M.E. for the case died in a car crash two days after he finished his diagnosis. Too convenient. Be careful.”
Mia deleted the message.
Mason’s files consisted of a brief synopsis of the details, copies of the medical examiner’s report and several image files. The sum total created more holes in the story, though the core points boiled down to a relationship Isa had somehow developed with an undercover cop linked to drug cartel surveillance. One of the officer’s contacts clearly indicated a man named Rasheer as a potential intermediary supplier.
Isa had exchanged a series of text messages with the cop from an email account, noted in the report.
Hardly seemed useful given her death. Mia rubbed her eyes with a sigh.
She had stalled accessing Rheanna’s files too, unable to replicate her access to the previous entries. She wondered if the problem was her own reluctance to reveal more of the Guardian’s sad tale. Finding a way to further her search was worse than walking hip-deep in mud.
She tapped her fingers on her leg and glanced at the time. Already nine o’clock. Tonight she would wrestle back control.
First step, get to Turen’s cell under her own steam.
Blatant exposure wasn’t smart, but planning offset risk, though intangibles were a problem. Like how much of her drive was a physical longing to be with Turen. At least she was honest about the desire. Her body didn’t care if he wasn’t completely human. She’d absolved him of potential threat and viewed him as unquestionably innocent. That should be nagging at her instincts. Yet no alarms rang in her head.
With confusion a vehicle for risk, she put a stake in the ground and firmly planted her faith in Turen’s innocence. She believed. If he was lying to her, she was screwed.
So be it.
She leaned back in the chair, inhaled slowly, and filled her lungs to the count of ten. Hold. Clear the mind. Slow breath out.
She worked through the sequences as she counted and kept her eyes closed for the plan’s last phases. It took several times but, concentration focused, she moved the superfluous negativity out of her mind’s space and rid her brain of fluff.
Meditation had helped both her focus and her sword practice. It compartmentalized the mental baggage and honed her defensive skills, both confidence boosters. Granted, she couldn’t yet battle her way out of a paper bag, but she could hold her own enough to get away. Baby steps.
Positive. Focus. Breathe.
Now she needed some control of her ability to come and go, to control the “fold” when she was awake. She wouldn’t be as vulnerable if she could do this.
Getting ahead of yourself. Focus. Breathe.
With her spine straight and her arms woven through the straps of the backpack in her lap, she let her hands fall loose, flexible over the pack’s canvas.
If she fell asleep, she would end up in Turen’s cell, but she would lack control. Not the way she wanted to work her endeavor. She needed to rest on the fringes of relaxation without slipping over the edge. Then, with any luck, she could make it happen again and eliminate coincidence.
Reach him and then tackle the return trip home.
Eyes closed and breathing steady, she drifted, letting her body drive. The lightness floated inside her, translucent. She waited and let the intrusion of her extraneous senses fade away as she chose the one she wanted, the internal sound, to pull her to him.
She wavered, loose and lax, calm and focused.
Movements swirled around her, so faint at first she mistook them for her own breathing and heartbeat. The drum of the rhythm, a remote pulsing under water and from a great distance, grew stronger with each breath she took. The floating lightness dissipated, replaced with the luminescence of glass, then of ice, and then pressure, all real to her imagination. Each lacked permanent substance against her body. Weightless, the peace faded away and the luminescence hardened. Behind her closed eyelids, light turned to gray and then to black. Calm stiffened to momentary panic, and then warmth bled to cold, hard rock.
She blinked and adjusted to the cell’s dim light. Turen sat beside her, silent, waiting for her to speak.
“Hey.” The backpack bulged and dug into her ribs as she crouched against the cell wall. In addition to water and food, she’d added more tools, heavy and weighty. She shifted to move the pack to the floor but he reached out first and set it aside.
“You’re laden like a pack mule. If you have to run with that pack, you won’t be able to maneuver.”
“I’ll drop it if I have to, but you need supplies or you won’t maintain your strength. Besides, between you and my instructor, I’m getting stronger.”
He raised a brow. “You’re awake. Did you manage this under your own efforts?”
“Sort of. I don’t understand the process yet. Lack of control drives me nuts.”
“You don’t say.” The sarcasm in his voice softened with his quick smile, though the hard shell of concern dropped back over his features too quickly. “This is a very dangerous thing. How about you practice going back home now?”
“This was your idea, remember? I agree about the risk,” she added quickly. “But don’t try to manipulate me with threats of danger. I don’t do fear well.”
“You don’t do caution well, either.”
“This”—she waved her hand around his cell—“isn’t something I can control, but I’m doing the best I can. It makes a difference to me that I can get here under my own steam. Let me decide what role I’m supposed to play. What role I’m able to play.” She shrugged and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Don’t I at least deserve that?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “You deserve many things. None of them are here. I’m not fighting you. I worry for you.”
She reached and covered his hand. “I understand, I really do. And while it doesn’t make you a troglodyte, it does waste my energy to push past all your ‘saving me from myself’ attempts. I need energy for other things. These last few nights of forcing myself to stay away didn’t help anything.”
He turned his hand and curled her fingers in his palm. His innocent gesture triggered a hot tingle through her body, and she pulled away before she lost control. Sanity and focus were critical. She couldn’t allow him to use sensual distraction just when she had finally made a little headway.
“I will support you to the best of my ability. So we’re clear on this, it will not go well with me if something bad happens to you. Please use caution in your pursuit of this adventure.” The stern measure of his tone changed with a tilt of his head and the deep assessment he gave her.
She reached out and touched his jaw with her fingertips. “I’m good with taking it one step at a time. You have to help me figure out how to help you. Maybe that’s all it will take to free both of us.” She forced back the cold tight grip in her chest. What a liar she was. She wanted him safe, free of the abuse and pain inflicted on him in this place, but then she would never see him again. Not something she’d prepared for yet, but an inevitable outcome.
“How can I support you?”
Mia distracted herself by searching through the pack for a sandwich and water. He accepted the food and waited on her answer.
“Your people have existed for a long time?”
“Since the beginning of mankind.”
She must have reacted, for he frowned.
“Is it too much to believe more than the human
race originated from the primordial soup?”
Ignoring his sidetrack, she pushed further. “Did your race begin in the Sanctum?”
Turen paused, his sandwich uneaten. The quiet deliberation of his thoughts signaled his wariness, his evaluation of what to tell her and where the line should be. The gaze he gave her was intense, calculating, a scrutiny of enemy or threat. A twinge of regret surged through her at eliciting this response. She had no choice.
“I trust you with my life, but I cannot extend that trust to my people. If you betray me, one of us will come for you. Know this.”
She nodded slowly. “I understand. But I need to know.” And she did understand. One slip and they would come for her. Her life would be forfeit, though he had said “one of us,” not that he would come and take her life.
He shook his head in exasperation, then followed with a curt nod. “My people started their existence at the Sanctum. We exist from the edge of the same bowl of creation as mankind. There are a finite number of my people. Each of us maintains a particular set of genes—genetic traits, abilities. Each set, intended to align and enhance corresponding skills and attributes in the human race. If these traits are lost in my race for all time, mankind’s ability to evolve and succeed, as it was intended, is derailed. Our existence is tied to the human existence in other, more elusive manners, too.”
The souls? He offered her the superpowers, but his stronger reluctance lay in explanation of the souls. “Why?”
“We are intended to have a symbiotic existence, Guardians and humans.”
An indication that humans weren’t lower on the food chain, just on a different chain. He was concentrating enough, shielding other information that he’d slipped in the Guardian reference without thinking. Good, she would be okay to slip in that detail herself, since she knew it through Rheanna’s messages. “What do Guardians get from this symbiosis?”
He frowned, evidently realizing his mistake, aware she wouldn’t let him take it back. “The same as humans: the fulfillment and attainment of a higher level of being. We become whole.”
There was something wrong with his statement, a glaring omission. She would never have detected it if she hadn’t spent hours by his side. Without the intimate exposure they’d shared, she would have taken him at his word. The tension in him read like a line of text, the strain of his breath, the false ease with which he’d tossed out the statement, all with tight restraint. His answer held truth and omission, certainty and confusion. Something else had been lost to his people with the destruction from the virus. Had they lost their link to their true purpose?
“Without children, then your contribution is gone forever? There’s no way to get it back?”
“Without children it is lost.”
“Is there no way to—”
“What? Manufacture one of us? Clone us?” He gave a sour laugh. “Something intrinsic would be lost. It’s like starting from scratch with a newborn without the ability to pass on our universal knowledge.”
“Are your children born with past knowledge?”
He smiled. “To a great extent our children evolve into our knowledge. Basic core concepts and functions evolve as we grow: folding, healing, in the past access to records and histories, our Archives. The genetic uniqueness, however, is unpredictable and evolves for each child at maturity. Each generation is intended to have a full complement of all the genetic variances and skills.”
“Leaving a big gap after the virus while the children were re-evolving. Weren’t there any records? Or documents? Or computer stuff?”
“Most of our records are not what you would consider written. They exist in a special medium, one we’ve lost the ability to access. Our parents mined the Archives of the past to search and extract details and add insights. None of us have any ability to call the repository.”
The Archives? The big, friggin’ teleprompter in her kitchen? She’d accessed the medium, as a mere mortal—maybe not so mere anymore. Inspired by a latent gene, or was her ability a human bridge for the Guardians who were now void of access? If the Guardians couldn’t get to the Archives, perhaps fate had provided a human being to connect the missing circuitry. At least for now. Talk about cyber security. Password protection at brain level. Fascinating.
“You’re very quiet.”
She brushed at her pant leg. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“Yet you hardly seem surprised.”
“For a human?” She flashed him a quick grin. He rolled his eyes, but the edge of his mouth twitched. “The information is intriguing, not like learning about the hybrids. I can go home and pretend this is all just a dream.”
“Can you really?” he asked softly.
Mia shifted uncomfortably, and then rubbed her hands down her shins to wick away the subtext of his words. Focus.
There was more to his confusion and sadness than just missing pieces of history. In the middle of this muck was the real reason for the planetary guilt Turen carried. The more she mulled through this, the less she understood how a trained warrior had allowed his own capture, even if information in this compound held all the answers.
“You really expect you can salvage Xavier,” she whispered. From all she had seen in this compound, that goal was a one-way mission.
Turen rested his arms across his knees and hung his head. “You think too much.”
“What if he kills you? Your skills will be lost, too. Is it worth so much? What can you hope to recoup by such a sacrifice?”
His head jerked up, his expression fierce. “My people are worth everything I can give them.”
She let out a snort. “We’ll just tattoo martyr across your forehead and be done with it.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “No confidence in my abilities?”
Unsettled, she looked away for a second and then met his gaze. “I have an incredible amount of confidence in you. You scare me with your strength of purpose. I know I don’t have a chance in hell of talking you out of it, so that leaves me with assisting you along your path of insanity. The vial in my backpack, what did you want me to do with it?”
This time he glanced away, finally caught off-guard. “Would you keep it for me, somewhere safe for the time being?”
“Of course.” She nodded. “It’s his?”
“I’m guessing, yes. Any more information you wish to extract from my addled brain?” A layer of humor wove beneath the challenge in his words. “Perhaps you can solve all of this with a snap of your fingers.”
“Yeah, I’ll click my ruby slippers three times and fix everything.”
He glanced at her black long-sleeve shirt, slacks, and boots. “Steel-toed leather is the new ruby?”
“Funny.” He’d told her to blend, and she was doing her best. She shifted under his gaze and crossed her arms over her legs. “I’m trying, Turen.”
He wrestled her hand free and brought her knuckles to his lips for the briefest of kisses. A kiss a dear friend would bestow. “I know you are, my Mia.”
***
The first prick and injection barely registered in Turen’s brain. A metallic jangle rang as the syringe hit the rim of the shallow steel bowl and slid to a rest in the belly. The smart snap of fingers against the inside of his elbow preceded the prick of the second needle before it, too, flipped to join the first.
There was no physical change. The three full syringes remaining on the table before him warned that wouldn’t remain the case for long.
“Leave him.” Xavier’s voice echoed in the small lab room.
Fingers dug into his shoulders. Then the force that pressed him into the seat of the chair suddenly released and the fetid breath of his guards moved away.
The last guard hesitated by the door. “What of restraints?”
“Unnecessary,” said Xavier.
Turen tried to move and found he couldn’t. His eyes were open and alert, but his head wouldn’t turn, though he could still hear his breath channel in and out of his nostrils like a horse ridden hard.
No, Xavier didn’t need help for this session.
“Leave.”
Turen caught sight of Rasheer from the corner of his eye. The man’s eyes widened in surprise and then narrowed with annoyance.
The door closed, and Xavier grabbed the steel bowl, pitching the syringes into a lit fireplace in the room’s corner. With a brief crackle a flair of green and blue peaked, and then dissolved into the golden flame.
Xavier picked up a rubber strap. With an ease that confirmed extensive practice, he fastened the rubber to his own arm with one hand and glanced at Turen.
Eyes void of color, stark white, scrutinized him without a blink.
In silence, Xavier flipped open the top of a bronze-colored bottle, then shook two white crystals onto a tablespoon on the tabletop. His thumb and forefinger snapped an ampoule of amber fluid and poured it on top of the crystals. He flicked the ampoule into the fireplace with a cold smile.
Lifting the spoon above one of several lit candles on the table, he melted the concoction until it was liquid. With delicate care, he lowered the spoon to a plate and used an empty syringe to siphon the content. He looked Turen in the eye, not a challenge, but a hard promise. Then Xavier plunged the needled into his own engorged vein. Not a muscle moved on Xavier’s body as the drug fed into his system.
His comrade’s eyes closed with a deep inhale, as if he sucked the drug through his nose and not his vein. Eyes snapped back open, the last vestige of the man before gone. A cold glaze of black pupils with pinpoint striations of silver replaced the white void from moments ago.
Shit, how could Xavier see? Either extreme seemed impossible.
The man gave him a snide grin as if he could hear Turen’s thoughts. “Now we will begin your cocktail, little brother.”
He pulled a chair next to Turen and waved his hand over the remaining syringes, all lined up. “The first two doses have immobilized you. It won’t last for long. The next two have multiple capabilities, not that you would care to know. It will feel as if you are wearing your insides on your skin. The last”—he tapped the final syringe—“knocks away your resistance for days.”